Chris reviewed Outside the dog museum by Jonathan Carroll
None
4 stars
The day I found this secondhand, I was coming up the stairs out of Victoria tube station and passed by a poster for Austrian Airlines, showing a rooftop view of Vienna. I immediately wanted to draw an arrow on the poster pointing to a building somewhere and scrawling DOG MUSEUM on it. Later that day, in Forbidden Planet (which I normally avoid, and go into New Worlds instead), I found a hardback of Outside the Dog Museum for £2. This is one of his funnier ones, luckily. Even so, I was looking for intimations of weirdness all day, including the strange synchrony of seeing two men with eyepatches within ten minutes of each other in Kensington High Street. Strangeness point in the novel: the villainous brother of the Arabian prince who commissions the dog museum is graced by the name ‘Cthulu’. If that is supposed to be a joke it’s …
The day I found this secondhand, I was coming up the stairs out of Victoria tube station and passed by a poster for Austrian Airlines, showing a rooftop view of Vienna. I immediately wanted to draw an arrow on the poster pointing to a building somewhere and scrawling DOG MUSEUM on it. Later that day, in Forbidden Planet (which I normally avoid, and go into New Worlds instead), I found a hardback of Outside the Dog Museum for £2. This is one of his funnier ones, luckily. Even so, I was looking for intimations of weirdness all day, including the strange synchrony of seeing two men with eyepatches within ten minutes of each other in Kensington High Street. Strangeness point in the novel: the villainous brother of the Arabian prince who commissions the dog museum is graced by the name ‘Cthulu’. If that is supposed to be a joke it’s a rather pointless one.
